Bettina Rheims: Heroïnes

Hardcover | 80 pp

Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont | 2006 | 9782912303233

Limited edition of 2000

The 23 portraits of women of this series are those of women with an off-beat beauty, photographed in a very sober setting, almost monochromatic grey, with a stone/base as only relief; a stone with which the models had to compose on the artist’s demand: “it is your stone, it is all what is left to you in the world…”

This series marks the accomplishment of Bettina Rheims’ desire to establish a link with sculpture in its photographic creation, translating the idea that “one could see the back of the people that one sees facing”; as if suddenly the portrayed models were visualised in 3D.

Being raised among works of art, the artist was stunned by the look of antique marbles, of Michelangelo’s Slaves in the Offices Gallery in Florence, by Rodin’s bronzes, wherein bodies seem to burst out of the stone, a gush that she intended to transcribe in this series of photos.

Bilingual French & English text by Catherine Millet, chief editor of the magazine Art Press, and author of the book La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (The sexual life of Catherine M.), who has introduced a new and very different form of erotic writing.